Hell these are Marines. Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain't shit.

Marine General Speaks Out During the initial assault on Baghdad, Kelly responding to a reporter if he would ever consider defeat. (April 2007)

The border is, if not wide open, then certainly open enough to get what the demand requires inside of the country. Terrorist organizations could seek to leverage those same smuggling routes to move operatives with intent to cause grave harm to our citizens or even bring weapons of mass destruction into the United States.

Posture Statement of General John F. Kelly, United States Marine Corps Commander, United States Southern Command, before the 114th Congress Senate Armed Services Committee (March 12, 2015)

Trump, a former military academy cadet- albeit not an enthusiastic one- had touted a return to military values and expertise. In fact, he most of all had sought to preserve his personal right to defy or ignore his own organization. This, too, made sense, since not really having an organization was the most efficient way to sidestep the people in your organization and to dominate them. It was just one irony of his courtship of admired military figures like James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.

In the wake of the immolating new conference, all eyes were suddenly on Kelly- this was his baptism of Trump fire. Spicer, Priebus, Cohn, Powell, Bannon, Tillerson, Mattis, Mnuchin- virtually the entire senior staff and cabinet of the Trump presidency, past and present, had traveled through the stages of adventure, challenge, frustration, battle, self-justification, and doubt, before finally having to confront the very real likelihood that the president they worked for- whose presidency they bore some official responsibility for- didnt have the wherewithal to adequately function in the job. The debate, as Bannon put it, was not about whether the president's situation was bad, but whether it was Twenty-Fifth-Amendment bad.

Tillerson would merely become another example of a subordinate who believed his own abilities could somehow compensate for Trump's failings. Aligned with Tillerson were three generals, Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly, each seeing themselves as representing maturity, stability, and restraint. And each, of course, was resented by Trump for it. The suggestion that any or all of these men might be more focused and even tempered than Trump himself was cause for sulking and tantrums on the president's part. The daily discussion among senior staffers, those still there and those now gone- all of whom had written off Tillerson's future in the Trump administration- was how long General Kelly would last as chief of staff. There was some thing of a virtual office pool, and the joke was that Reince Priebus was likely to be Trump's longest-serving chief of staff. Kely's distaste for the president was open knowledge- in his every word and gesture he condescended to Trump- the president's distaste for Kelly even more so. It was sport for the president to defy Kelly, who had become the one thing in his life he had never been able to abide: a disapproving and censorious father figure.